Last Monday was a profound evening, hearing Dr. Charles Krauthammers speak to the Center for the American Experiment. He is a brilliant intellectual, seasoned and articulate. He is forthright and careful in his analysis, and never resorts to emotions or personal insults. He is NOT a fear monger nor an extremist in his comments and views. He is a fiscal conservative, and has a Pulitzer prize for writing. He is a frequent contributor to Fox News and writes weekly for the Washington Post. The entire room was held spellbound during his talk. I have shared this with many of you and several have asked me to summarize his comments, as we are living in uncharted waters economically and internationally. Even 2 Democrats at my table agreed with everything he said!

If you feel like forwarding this to those who are open minded and have not ‘drunk the Kool-Aid’, feel free.

A summary of his comments:

1. Mr.Obama is a very intellectual, charming individual. He is not to be underestimated. He is a ‘cool customer’ who doesn’t show his emotions. It’s very hard to know what’s ‘behind the mask’. Taking down the Clinton dynasty from a political neophyte was an amazing accomplishment.. The Clinton’s still do not understand what hit them. Obama was in the perfect place at the perfect time.

2. Obama has political skills comparable to Reagan and Clinton. He has a way of making you think he’s on your side, agreeing with your position, while doing the opposite. Pay no attention. to what he SAYS; rather, watch what he DOES!

3. Obama has a ruthless quest for power. He did not come to Washington to make something out of himself, but rather to change everything, including dismantling capitalism. He can’t be straightforward on his ambitions, as the public would not go along. He has a heavy hand, and wants to ‘level the playing field with income redistribution and punishment of the achievers of society. He would like to model the USA to Great Britain or Canada.

4. His 3 main goals are to control ENERGY, PUBLIC EDUCATION, & NAT’L HEALTHCARE by the Federal government. He doesn’t care about the auto or financial services industries, but got them as an early bonus. The cap and trade will add costs to everything and stifle growth. Paying for FREE college education is his goal. Most scary is the healthcare program, because if you make it FREE and add 46,000,000 people to a Medicare-type single-payer system, the costs will go thru the roof. The only way to control costs is with massive RATIONING of services, like in Canada. God forbid.

5. He’s surrounded himself with mostly far-left academic types. No one around him has ever run even a candy store. But they’re going to try and run the auto, financial, banking and other industries. This obviously can’t work in the long run. Obama’s not a socialist; rather a far-left secular progressive bent on nothing short of revolution. He ran as a moderate, but will govern from the hard left. Again, watch what he does, not what he says.

6. Obama doesn’t really see himself as President of the USA, more as a ruler over the world. He sees himself above it all, trying to orchestrate and coordinate various countries and their agendas. He sees moral equivalency in all cultures. His apology tour in Germany and England was a prime example of how he sees America, as an imperialist nation that has been arrogant, rather than a great noble nation that has at times made errors. This is the 1st President ever who has chastised our allies and appeased our enemies!

7. He’s now handing out goodies. He hopes that the bill (& pain) will not ‘come due’ until after he’s reelected in 2012. He’d like to blame all problems on Bush from the past, and hopefully his successor in the future. He has a huge ego, and Mr. Krauthammer believes he is a narcissist.

8. Republicans are in the wilderness for a while, but will emerge strong. We’re ‘pining’ for another Reagan, but there’ll never be another like him. He believes Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty & Bobby Jindahl (except for his terrible speech in Feb.) are the future of the party. Newt Gingrich is brilliant, but has baggage. Sarah Palin is sincere and intelligent, but needs to really be seriously boning up on facts and info if she’s to be a serious candidate in the future.. We need to return to the party of lower taxes, smaller government., personal responsibility, strong National defense, and States’ rights.

9. The current level of spending is irresponsible and outrageous. We’re spending trillions that we don’t have. This could lead to hyperinflation, depression or worse. No country has ever spent themselves into prosperity. The media is giving Obama, Reid & Pelosi a pass because they love their agenda. But eventually the bill will come due and people will realize the huge bailouts didn’t work, nor will the stimulus pkg. These were trillion-dollar payoffs to Obama’s allies, unions & the Congress to placate the left, so he can get support for #4 above.

10. The election was over in mid-Sept. when Lehman brothers failed. Fear & panic swept in, we had an unpopular President, and the war was grinding on indefinitely w/o a clear outcome. The people are in pain, and the mantra of ‘change’ caused people to act emotionally. Any Democrat would have won this election; it was surprising it was as close as it was.

11. In 2012, if the unemployment rate is over 10%, Republicans will be swept back into power. If it’s under 8%, the Democrats continue to roll. If it’s between 8-10%, it’ll be a dogfight. It’ll all be about the economy.

I hope this gets you really thinking about what’s happening in Washington and Congress. There’s a left-wing revolution going on, according to Krauthammer, and he encourages us to keep the faith and join the loyal resistance. The work will be hard, but we’re right on most issues and can reclaim our country, before it’s far too late. Direct all replies to : josephrbutler@jhu.edu IN GOD WE TRUST!

Obama’s 32 Czars

By Eric Cantor

Thursday, July 30, 2009

“The biggest problems thatwe’re facingright now haveto do with George Bush trying to bring more and more power into the executive branch and not go through Congress at all. And that’s what I intend to reverse when I’m president of the United States.” — Sen. Barack Obama, March 31, 2008

The LAST paragraph from this article: The point here is not that President Obama’s reliance on czars is illegal (although it does raise significant, unresolved constitutional issues). Nor is it that these czars are bad people. It’s that we have not been able to vet them, and that we have no idea what they’re doing. It’s that candidate Obama made a pledge to keep Congress in the light. Yet less than six months after his inauguration, the president appears intent to keep Congress more and more in the dark. Dozens of czars at a time.

To say President Obama failed to follow through on this promise is an understatement. By appointing a virtual army of “czars” — each wholly unaccountable to Congress yet tasked with spearheading major policy efforts for the White House — in his first six months, the president has embarked on an end-run around the legislative branch of historic proportions.

To be sure, the appointment of a few special officers to play a constructive role in a given administration is nothing new. What is new is the elevation of so many czars, with so much authority on endless policy fronts. Vesting such broad authority in the hands of people not subjected to Senate confirmation and congressional oversight poses a grave threat to our system of checks and balances.

At last count, there were at least 32 active czars that we knew of, meaning the current administration has more czars than Imperial Russia.

Even Democratic Sen. Robert Byrd (W.Va.) was fearful enough to pen a letter to President Obama in February highlighting his concerns with the administration’s tactics. The Constitution mandates that the Senate confirm Cabinet-level department heads and other appointees in positions of authority — known as “principal officers.” This gives Congress — elected by the people — the power to compel executive decision-makers to testify and be held accountable by someone other than the president. It also ensures that key appointees cannot claim executive privilege when subpoenaed to come before Congress.

As we move forward, proper oversight of the growing lineup of czars is essential. From orchestrating bailouts to making industrial policies to moving toward government-run national health care, Washington seems intent on sailing into uncharted waters — and the czars are often steering the ship.

The car czar, who stepped down this month amid controversy over his former firm’s role in a scandal, had been managing government’s recent takeover of a huge swath of the domestic auto industry and making decisions for auto companies. The pay czar — also known in White House circles as the “special master for compensation” — has the power to reject or accept any current and future compensation for the top 100 earners at companies that received, in some cases under pressure, money from the Troubled Assets Relief Program. In the coming months he will decide the fate of $235 million in pending retention bonuses at AIG. And the health czar, meanwhile, has become as influential as perhaps anyone in the Obama administration, spearheading White House negotiations with doctors, hospitals and other health providers. She will play a key role in determining which medicines, treatments and cures are deemed necessary for the public.

The point here is not that President Obama’s reliance on czars is illegal (although it does raise significant, unresolved constitutional issues). Nor is it that these czars are bad people. It’s that we have not been able to vet them, and that we have no idea what they’re doing. It’s that candidate Obama made a pledge to keep Congress in the light. Yet less than six months after his inauguration, the president appears intent to keep Congress more and more in the dark. Dozens of czars at a time.

In the Muslim faith a Muslim man can marry a child as young as 1 year old and have sexual intimacy with this child. Consummating the marriage by 9.

The dowry is given to the family in exchange for the woman (who becomes his slave) and for the purchase of the private parts of the woman, to use her as a toy.

Even though a woman is abused she can not obtain a divorce.

To prove rape, the woman must have (4) male witnesses.

Often after a woman has been raped, she is returned to her family and the family must return the dowry. The family has the right to execute her (an honor killing) to restore the honor of the family. Husbands can beat their wives ‘at will’ and he does not have to say why he has beaten her.

The husband is permitted to have (4 wives) and a temporary wife for an hour (prostitute) at his discretion.

The Shariah Muslim law controls the private as well as the public life of the woman.

In the West World ( America ) Muslim men are starting to demand Shariah Law so the wife can not obtain a divorce and he can have full and complete control of her. It is amazing and alarming how many of our sisters and daughters attending American Universities are now marrying Muslim men and submitting themselves and their children unsuspectingly to the Shariah law.

By passing this on, enlightened American women may avoid becoming a slave under Shariah Law.

Learn More….. Read: Cruel and Usual Punishment just released in most bookstores.

Ripping the West in Two.

Author and lecturer Nonie Darwish says the goal of radical Islamists is to impose Shariah law on the world, ripping Western law an and liberty in two.

She recently authored the book, Cruel and Usual Punishment: The Terrifying Global Implications of Islamic Law.

Darwish was born in Cairo and spent her childhood in Egypt and Gaza before emigrating to America in 1978, When she was eight years old, her father died while leading covert attacks on Israel . He was a high- ranking Egyptian military officer stationed with his family in Gaza .

When he died, he was considered a “shahid,” a martyr for jihad. His posthumous status earned Nonie and her family an elevated position in Muslim society.

But Darwish developed a skeptical eye at an early age. She questioned her own Muslim culture and upbringing. She converted to Christianity after hearing a Christian preacher on television.

In her latest book, Darwish warns about creeping sharia law – what it is, what it means, and how it is manifested in Islamic countries.

For the West, she says radical Islamists are working to impose sharia on the world. If that happens, Western civilization will be destroyed..

In twenty years there will be enough Muslim voters in the U.S. to elect the President! I think everyone in the U.S. should be required to read this, but with the ACLU, there is no way this will be widely publicized, unless each of us sends it on!

On the heels of two disastrous election cycles, the conventional wisdom was that Republicans were doomed to wander in the wilderness for decades unless their party underwent serious changes. Even on the right, there quickly emerged a cottage industry of conservative self-help books dedicated to helping the GOP rebuild and rebrand.

The prescriptions varied depending on the authors’ policy prescriptions: embrace big government or repudiate compassionate conservatism, rethink the national security policy of the Bush years or return to the approach of the first Bush term, jettison polarizing social issues or use them to build bridges into minority communities. But there was some rough consensus that the party needed to formulate an economic agenda for the middle class, come to terms with its past failures and find its voice on issues like health care.

Republicans have done almost none of these things. No promising national leader has come forward with a stature approaching Barack Obama’s. Quite the contrary, Republicans have recently watched the implosion of South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford and the resignation of former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. The party remains much more readily identifiable by what it is against rather than what it is for, and moderate figures like Colin Powell continue to lament its capture by “a very far right wing” base.

Beneath the prognostications of doom and gloom, however, Republicans are showing real signs of life. The GOP is heavily favored to take the governorship in New Jersey this year, where Republican Chris Christie leads by double digits in some polls. Republicans are slight favorites in the Virginia governor’s race, despite an increasing Democratic trend in the Old Dominion over the past few elections.

If the 2010 elections were held today, Republicans would pick up a Senate seat in Connecticut (if the Democrats don’t get Chris Dodd first) and have an even shot of reclaiming Arlen Specter’s in Pennsylvania — the latter by running a former president of the Club for Growth. Republicans would even win a one-on-one race against Gov. Deval Patrick in Massachusetts, one of the nation’s bluest states.

According to both NPR and Rasmussen Reports, Republicans now lead in the generic congressional ballot. National Republicans have succeeded in getting their top choices to run for Senate in Illinois and Florida. Delaware may not be far behind. Just this week, they managed to nudge their most vulnerable incumbent, Sen. Jim Bunning of Kentucky, into retirement, improving their chances in that state.

House Republicans are faring even better at candidate recruitment. They have a target-rich environment, as the Democratic majority is padded with the votes of red-state congressmen who in 2006 and 2008 won districts where Obama was unpopular back when his national approval ratings were above 60 percent. Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Texas), chairman of the GOP’s congressional campaign committee, boasts that he will make a play for 80 Democratic-held seats next year.

Congressional Quarterly‘s analysis makes clear that Republicans are longshots to retake even the House at this point. But unlike many of the Democrats representing districts carried by John McCain, most of the 34 Republicans holding seats in Obama districts have weathered tough election cycles before; 2010 will be a very different climate than 2006 or 2008.

That’s why the Democrats’ best pickup opportunities are in Obama districts where the incumbents are not running for re-election: Mark Kirk in Illinois, Jim Gerlach in Pennsylvania, John McHugh in New York, and maybe soon Michael Castle in Delaware. There are many more Walt Minnicks and Frank Kratovils — junior Democrats representing conservative-leaning areas — in the House than Joseph Caos.

Far from heeding the centrists’ advice, Republicans have followed a strategy of opposition to most of Obama’s major initiatives: the stimulus, cap and trade, health care, and even Sonia Sotomayor. In the Senate Judiciary Committee this week, Sens. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) voted against a Supreme Court nominee for the first time in their careers.

With a stimulus that has failed to stimulate, a health care plan that is starting to tank in the polls, and politically tone-deaf Democratic forays into racial politics, opposition has so far been a profitable strategy for Republicans. It may continue to pay dividends. Whatever yesterday’s deal between Henry Waxman and the Blue Dogs does for the prospects of health care reform, pass or fail it makes Democrats in marginal districts vote on tax increases, a bigger budget deficit, and mandatory abortion coverage.

The danger of an opposition-based strategy that doesn’t address any of the GOP’s long-term problems is obvious: if the economy begins to recover, if Obama’s approval ratings improve following a major legislative victory Republicans are still powerless to deny him, if the party peaks in 2010 and forces the president to tack to the center before running for re-election, Republicans won’t be left with much to say.

Bill Clinton’s liberal overreach doomed the Democrats in 1994. Triangulation, and a Republican Party that couldn’t find more inspiring leadership than what Bob Dole had to offer, saved them in 1996.

Yet even with those risks, it is possible that the Republican Party’s epitaphs following 2006 and 2008 will look as premature as the talk of a permanent Republican majority was after 2004.
W. James Antle, III is associate editor of The American Spectator.

The President’s Warped Foreign Policy

Escalating fallout from President Obama’s castigation of a Massachusetts police officer could damage the credibility of a leader who speaks boldly about complex foreign policy matters without showing comprehension of the underlying issues. If Obama rushed to judgment without knowing all the facts about an arrest in Cambridge, what does this tell us about the basis for his foreign policy pronouncements?

Indisputably, the President knows less about the Middle East and other overseas regions than he does about Cambridge, where he spent three years at Harvard Law School. Obama’s initial reaction –castigating the policeman for supposedly acting “stupidly” — was based on assumptions (some would call them prejudices) anchored in the President’s belief system.

On several different fronts, Obama’s foreign policy initiatives are likewise being challenged as based on warped analysis. Mackubin Thomas Owens, a professor at the Naval War College and recipient of a Silver Star for valor as a combat officer in Vietnam, asserts in the Wall Street Journal that in foreign policy “Obama has demonstrated a disturbing propensity to curry favor with our adversaries at the expense of our friends.” As cases in point, Owens — who is editor of the journal of the Foreign Policy Research Institute — cites Obama’s abandonment of the Czechs and the Poles to placate Russia over placement of missile defense and “Obama’s attempted bullying” of Israel.

Like other analysts, Owens shows that Obama’s pressure on Israel is counterproductive, in that it encourages the Palestinians to believe they need not make any concessions because the U.S will “deliver” Israel. After a July13 meeting with American Jewish representatives hand-picked by the White House, the Administration hastened to suggest that it was equivalently pressuring the Arabs.

Ira Forman, CEO of a cheerleading crew known as the National Jewish Democratic Council, circulated Obama’s claim that “we have been very specific with the Arab world on incitement, violence, accepting the reality of Israel and conveying that to their street.” When I e-mailed Forman to ask for the proof, I was referred to NJDC’s website, which contains no such proof. The Administration has not coherently explained why all its visible pressure in the Middle East — to the extent of repudiating assurances given Israel by President Bush — is applied against a democracy which has already made massive tangible concessions, e.g., the Oslo Accords and withdrawals from Gaza and Lebanon (for each of which it was rewarded with a war aimed its civilian population).

Obama displayed the chutzpah to tell Israel’s leaders, who – -unlike him — are experienced in matters of war and peace, to engage in “serious self-reflection.” No symmetrical suggestion was directed to the Arabs, who refuse to recognize Israel as a Jewish state and demand the “Right of Return” for four million allleged refugees.

Are Obama’s views about the Middle East skewered by some of the misapprehensions revealed in his Cairo speech to the Muslim world, e.g., that Jewish attachment to Israel commenced in the 1940s, that Palestinian displacement is similar to the Holocaust or that there are seven millions Muslims in the U.S?

Equally incomprehensible to many experts on Latin America is Obama’s demanding reinstatement of former Honduran President Manuel Zelaya, who was deposed by his country’s Supreme Court for trying to rig an unconstitutional referendum — with ballots printed in Venezuela — to perpetuate his rule. A referendum to evade constitutional term limits is a favored and exported tactic of anti-American Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez. Nicaraguan Communist President Daniel Ortega announced plans last week for a referendum which would allow him, like Chavez, to become president for life.

Moises Starkman, a respected Honduran diplomat and technocrat, said of Zelaya’s so-far futile efforts to return to Honduras: “This is a showdown which will determine if the Chavista model triumphs or not.” My friend Jaime Darenblum, Costa Rica’s foremost lawyer who served six years as his country’s ambassador in Washington, told the Weekly Standard:

“Zelaya tried to hold an unconstitutional referendum. The Supreme Court rebuked him. Zelaya embraced mob tactics and launched his own coup against democracy. With judicial backing, the army (as well the Congress) moved to stop him. If you want to blame someone, blame Zelaya.”

What followed could have passed for comedy. At a leftist summit, Chavez and Cuba’s Raul Castro stridently demanded that “democracy” be respected in Honduras! Zelaya has been credibly linked with smuggling planeloads of cocaine which end up in the U.S. He is charged in a case where three of his top officials were caught stealing two million dollars from Honduras’ central bank — in suitcases! — to fund his election campaign.

Secretary Clinton had the good sense to criticize Zelaya for “reckless” conduct in trying to storm his way back into Honduras. But the Obama Administration is threatening all kinds of sanctions and terminating aid if Zelaya is not restored. Obama has not explained why it is in our country’s interest to make another hate-America caudillo a president-for-life in contravention of his country’s laws. Nor why he immediately jumped on the Zelaya bandwagon while showing reluctance to “meddle” when the Iranian mullans were shooting peaceful demonstrators. If Obama knows something about Zelaya that regional experts like Starkman and Darenblum don’t know, he should explain it. Otherwise, it may be concluded that our President just has a penchant for leftist dictators and that he knows less about Honduras than he knows about Cambridge. .

The briefings I have received at U.S. Southern Command in Florida make vivid the threat to our country of terrorism from the South; Iranian agents are already active in Venezuela and Nicaragua. Do we want to give them another base in Honduras? AND you might say, perhaps in a special box: Within 24 hours, the White House distanced itself from Biden’s ruminations,

Obama is unwittingly assisted by his Vice-President in exposing our foreign policy as feckless. Mr. Biden is quoted as saying about Russia — in a front-page Wall Street Journal interview conducted during a trip to two of its understandably frightened neighbors — that Moscow’s “withering” economy will compel it to make wide-ranging concessions to the West. Biden is correct about the Russian economy. But anyone with even scant knowledge about dealing with the Russians, something I have been doing for almost 40 years, understands that this kind of foot-in-mouth critique will inevitably get the Kremlin’s back up — very high!

Russians substantially support Putin’s authoritarianism because they resented the humiliation of relegation to the status of a second-class power. See, for example, Inside the Stalin Archives: Discovering the New Russia. Vice-President Gaffe’s remarks may come back to haunt when we need Russian help on Iran and North Korea, which we surely will because Obama opts for reliance on the dysfunctional United Nations.

One could go on about other Obama foreign policy disasters. With all his apologetics in Europe, the President was unable to enlist any additional NATO combat forces for Afghanistan. Lacking these reinforcements, Obama’s war of choice is not going so well. In the coming months, it will be increasingly remembered that Obama — a neophyte in security matters — was dead wrong about the surge in Iraq.

No one yet knows what the contours of “engagement” with Iran are. The reality is that every day Tehran comes closer to ultimate game-changing nuclear-power status. Secretary Clinton’s recent comment about a U.S. security “umbrella” implied that Obama was accepting Iranian nuclear weaponizing, though this was quickly denied. No one has made sense of the claim of Obama’s U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice that their weakened legitimacy would somehow make Iran’s mullahs more forthcoming.

Nor can we forget North Korea, Iran’s partner in crime (the term, “Axis of Evil has been outlawed), which violates U.N. resolutions with impunity and fires salvos of missiles. Obama’s aims have been reduced to hoping Pyongyang “will return to the Six-Party talks” Those talks have resulted in enormous concessions to North Korea, such as food deliveries for its army, while its civilians starve to death, in return for which every promise made has been broken.

It was Tip O’Neill, a powerful Massachusetts pol, who taught that “all politics is local politics.” So let us return to Cambridge.

It did not take long for the uproar from Massachusetts policemen and lots of plain folks, offended by presidential maligning of what appeared to be a fine officer acting professionally, to be heard with alarm in the White House. It was said by sources close to the President that his focus on health care — another subject on which much of what he says is difficult to verify — was being undermined.

Obama’s credibility was being questioned by folks who previously accepted his explanations.

Although Obama came to realize that he had erred, the backlash did not move him to apologize for defaming a good man. The most self-responsibility he could muster was to acknowledge, in perpetual campaigning mode, that he could have “calibrated” his words differently. The arrest of Gates and the mistake Obama made — based on his belief systems — in responding to it are in themselves small events. But the mistakes Obama is making — based on his preconceptions — in his foreign policies are not small events with small consequences. Will Obama’s inability to apologize prevent him for recognizing adverse consequences resulting from his policies? If Obama can’t get Cambridge right, how can he get the Middle East and .Central America right?

Joel J. Sprayregen, a Chicago lawyer, is associated with JINSA (Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs) and other think tanks dealing with international security issues.

Want to know how House Speaker Pelosi used some of the Stimulus money in her district? Remember this is your tax dollars at work! It may be a drop in the bucket when you compare it to a trillion dollars but disgusting nevertheless.

Mark Kelly of the Heritage Foundation did some digging on where the House Speaker funneled her District’s dollars, and the list of projects is enough to send taxpayers through the roof. Let me put it this way: Nancy Pelosi is trying to stimulate a lot more than San Francisco’s economy. While the average American is worried about losing his shirt, Congress is funding actors who aren’t wearing any!

According to Kelly, $50,000 was sent to an initiative called CounterPulse in San Francisco that just sponsored a “Perverts [Sleep Around]” event on July 25, urging people to “Join your fellow pervs for some explicit, twisted fun!” Another $50,000 went directly to an entertainment group called Frameline that concentrates on promoting the “lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community” in the arts.

Over at “San Francisco Cinematheque,” organizers raked in $25,000 to promote documentaries like “Thundercrack,” of which a reviewer writes, “Witness if you dare, the world’s only underground kinky art porno horror film, complete with four men, three women and a gorilla.” A company called Jess Curtis/Gravity, Inc. will receive $25,000, presumably to help boost their Symmetry Project, which features nude couples in compromising positions.

Other programs are too crude and embarrassing to even mention. But shouldn’t that say something to the third most powerful leader in America? If these projects are too obscene to talk about, what business does the U.S. government have funding them? This isn’t just waste–it’s reckless, indecent garbage sponsored by Congress and paid for by you. If these are the priorities of America’s new leadership, then we should definitely get a second opinion on their vision for an issue as significant as health care. For more on Pelosi’s “waste” line, visit Mark’s blog at markkelly.posterous.com.

Obama Fails

Over the past couple of weeks, it has become apparent even to politicians and the media that the Demented Spree Act of 2009, better known perhaps as the “Obama Stimulus”, has not worked, and shows no sign of ever working.

Unemployment — the professed reason for the stimulus in the first place — is now at 9.5% and will break 10% within the next few months. Credit remains tight and industry is still fumbling. It is clear that there are no shortcuts back to a steady prosperity, that this recession will be overcome in the exact way such disasters always have been — by working our way out of it. The $787 billion (“real money”, as Everett Dirksen would have put it), already spent, being spent, and to be spent, can be considered as so much waste paper.

The interesting thing about this is the reaction of our media and political elites — or rather, the lack of reaction. They’re behaving as if flushing away three-quarters of a trillion dollars is trivial. The failure of the greatest act of financial pump-priming in history has elicited no more than a collective shrug. Cognitive dissonance doesn’t come more obtuse than this. Our great opinion leaders have stumbled over a huge pile of facts having serious bearing on O’s future prospects and rather than pausing to take a look have instead gotten to their feet, brushed themselves off, and hurried away exactly as if nothing happened. The pretense appears to be that the fate of the stimulus has nothing at all to do with the rest of Obamus Maximus’s policies.

Of course it does. The collapse of the stimulus can be taken as representative of Obama’s policies, past, present, and future. The stimulus shares one major element with every other program this administration has come up with: they have all been tried before, and they have all failed.

First up is health care. We’re constantly reminded that the U.S. is the only industrialized nation lacking a national health-care system, without anyone going on to add how lucky we are. Health care systems of the exact type promised by Daddy Obama are omnipresent all across the world, their records open for our edification and enlightenment. A close look at only the Mother Country will suffice.

Here’s what a search on “UK NHS” a few weeks ago came up with: a maggot infestation at the Royal Children’s Hospital (the staff assured parents there was nothing to worry about). A sick woman who grew so tired of lying in filth that she got up out of her hospital bed and cleaned the room herself, dragging her IV behind her (The nurses, she reported, “let her get on with it.”) The two emergency medical techs arrested for letting a patient die while they stood around and cracked jokes. The fact that the UK has once again achieved the highest levels of superbug infestations in the industrialized world (over 32,000 hospital patients die of MRSA alone each year). The so-called “Mental Capacity Act”, under the terms of which a patient unable to communicate is to be considered “due to die”, and denied food and water, the same treatment meted out to Terry Schaivo. Across the UK, families have been rescuing aged relatives declared surplus under the terms of the act.

And last but not least, we encounter Prof. Trevor Sheldon, one of the UK’s leading authorities on health-care policy. In 2007, Professor Sheldon published a study on mortality in British hospitals. According to that study, the NHS kills up to 91,030 patients each year through “avoidable” mishaps. The professor went on to assure readers that these numbers are matched in many other countries, but that’s not quite the case. To equal the UK number, the U.S., with six times the population, would have to suffer 450,000 unnecessary deaths annually.

All in all, this sounds like a system that, if put in place by an occupying enemy power, would be considered a war crime. But it’s the system Obama is wishing on us. Needless to say, none of this has been mentioned in the mass media, for fear of confusing and alarming the public, although it’s finding its way into the debate anyway. My prediction is that nothing like ObamaCare will be passed anytime soon. ObamaCare has already been “delayed” past its original launch date, which in Washington terms usually means it’s dead-on-arrival.

Our next item from the Obama piñata concerns industrial policy, namely the administration’s enthusiastic takeover of industry for the benefit of all. This is one instance where the imputation of fascism is perfectly accurate. This policy, known as “corporatism”, comprised the economic system of fascist Italy. Corporatism was developed at the behest of Mussolini as an answer to the manifest failure of Soviet-style expropriation. It divided Italian industry into easily-run sectors with the state acting as upper management, exactly as the administration is doing for GM, Chrysler, and a large chunk of the financial sector.

And how did this work for Il Duce’s Italy? During the Depression, Italy coped worse than any other nation in Europe. Real wages fell 20%, as did investment, while international trade was cut nearly in half. Per capita private consumption remained below the 1929 level straight into WW II. Corporatism also had a clear impact on the war itself. Italy had one of the largest fleets in the world, with battleships equal to anything on the seas. But they weren’t equipped with either radar or modern fire-control systems — there was no corporative sector for electronics, you see. So the British, using the primitive gun-laying radar of the period, managed to ambush the Italians twice and put much of their fearsome navy at the bottom of the Mediterranean.

The Nazi example is even more entertaining. In the 30s, German aircraft development was nationalized and handed over to Ernst Udet, WW I ace, expert pilot, and complete wacko. Udet became obsessed with dive bombers after seeing a U.S. Navy demonstration team and decreed that all German bombers must be able to dive. This was obeyed with Nazi alacrity and German efficiency. From then on, all bombers were modified according to decree, up to and including a heavy bomber, the He-177 Greif, truly one of the weirdest designs ever — a plane the size of a 757 fitted with dive brakes. The end result was that Germany fought the Battle of Britain with no usable strategic bombers, and failed to defeat the British. Knowing that this meant the war was lost, and aware of his personal responsibility, Udet shot himself in 1941.

Compare this to what occurred in the U.S. at the same time. Henry J. Kaiser, a steel magnate who had scarcely ever set foot on a ship in his life, had the brainstorm of building ships the same way they did cars, using prefab parts on what amounted to an assembly line. The result was the Liberty Ship, a squat, ugly little devil of a freighter that became a legend for shipping every kind of cargo there was to every last corner of the earth. Down in New Orleans, Andrew Higgins offered to build a landing craft for the Marines after a government department screwed the project up. Working from a drawing, Higgins had a prototype ready for tests in less than a month. The LCVP — the “Higgins boat”, became an emblem of victory, the troops racing over its dropped ramp one of the memorable images of the war.

These ideas would never have occurred to any “central planner” and could not have been rammed through the bureaucracy if they had. They were products of the creative chaos that prevails under true capitalism and is its chief, often overlooked virtue. (This, by the way, gives the lie to people John Kenneth Galbraith who contend that “planning” won WW II.) So let’s all wave goodbye to GM while we still have the chance.

Third on the list is the ever-popular topic of liberal foreign policy. Now, anybody who does not understand the shortcomings of appeasement really deserves his own umbrella with “Neville Chamberlain” engraved on the handle. The problem is that I’m not sure that Obama needs a dozen umbrellas. The sole innovation he has made in hail-fellow-well-met foreign policy is that he’s appeasing everybody. And even there, Jimmy Carter may well have surpassed him.

Carter came into office with a lot of appeasing to catch up with, but he managed to bring it off. Within four short years, he saw that the Sandinistas took over Nicaragua, assured that the Shah was overthrown and replaced by elements out of the 12th century, undermined a legitimate democratic election to put Robert Mugabe in control of Zimbabwe, and enabled Russian tanks to find their way to Kabul with no unnecessary holdups or delays. And somewhere in there, he found time to see that no assistance was given to the Vietnamese boat people, so that thousands of them drowned or were murdered by pirates.

Clearly, Obama has quite a challenge ahead of him to match this record. But he’s off to a good start. Today, less than eight months into office, he has Kim shooting off missiles with the intensity of a meth addict, the Iranian mullahs all but publicly marking targets in Israel, and Chavez grunting insults on Venezuelan TV while Danny Ortega (one of Jimmy’s little friends), threatens to intervene in an internal political crisis in Honduras. If he keeps this up, Obama may very well take the appeasement cup from Jimmy, leaving himself plenty of time to give Indonesia back to the Hobbits.

So what does this tell us about Obama? For the AT readership, it speaks above all to the phenomenon of conservative despair. Since last November conservatives have been in a complete funk over Obama and his intentions for the country. It’s as if they believed in Obama’s messiahhood to an even greater extent than the followers who believed Obama was the One, the Alpha and the Omega. Problems simply solve themselves in his presence. The oceans stop rising. Cracked glasses are made whole again. Henry Louis Gates overcomes writer’s block. Obama could not fail — Obamacare, the Obama Recovery, the Obama Century were in the bag. America as we knew it was doomed.

Among our Northeast Exquisites, this attitude has led to direct collaboration. In the heartland, it has given rise to desperation and feverish hunts for will-of-the-wisp “solutions” such as the birth certificate. (As an aside, amid all the uproar I can’t help but notice that nobody has produced a birth certificate from Nairobi.)

That there is now no justification for this goes without saying. But as the record shows clearly enough, there has never been any justification for it. Obama cannot make it work. Here is a man whose entire basis of belief and action was that he was living outside of history, not subject to its lessons or limitations. He is now, as my old granddad used to say, getting a rude awakening, learning what truly capable presidents ranging from Lincoln to Truman to, yes, even the despised George W. Bush, knew at the beginning: that the limitations entwining a president are not less than those of the man in the street, they are greater. Very few things are possible to a president, and even those few must be handled with infinite care and attention to detail. Even if Obama learns this lesson, he is learning it very late. So there will be no social revolution, no left-wing Rapture, no Promised Land. The Red Sea has been bid to part, and the waters have stayed right where they were. Obama is no Moses; he is simply another example of liberalism’s long, miserable decline.

About a year ago I wrote on this site that Obama’s chief characteristic was his flakiness, and that come what may, that would eventually be clearly seen. Well, behold his flakehood made manifest, and a superhuman and preternatural flakiness it is too. Obama may yet prove to be one of the most remarkable presidents of the emerging millennium. Despite himself, he may well be the president who discredits the liberal brand for good and all.